IVOA Vocabularies is now a REC

Mmm: that has taken a while. But the Vocabularies document is now an IVOA Recommendation.

The semantic web awaits...

IVOA Vocabularies document now a Proposed Recommendation

The IVOA's 'vocabularies' document, proposing that the IVOA adopt SKOS as a standard framework for formalising controlled vocabularies, is now a Proposed Recommendation, and in its RFC period, until 2008 October 17.

Phew.  It's ended up taking somewhat longer than I expected it would, but I'm confident this will provide a firm foundation for lots of interesting and useful semantics work in the VO in future.

Powerset

An interesting way to extract information from wikipedia, where you can try natural language queries: http://www.powerset.com/ It retrieves relevant articles, and highlights the most relevant sentences within articles. I got interesting answers for: "What is a standard candle in astronomy?" "When was the first supernova observed?" But sometimes the results are more precise, giving you the exact answer ! "Who discovered the neutrino?" "Who killed kennedy?" "When was Albert Einstein born?"

The semantic naturalist

The SPIRE project is a new US effort to understand how semantic web technologies can help specifically ecoinformatics (not something I'd heard of before, but intra-word syntax is a wonderful thing).

They've started a blog, and one of their early postings is about how they're planning to link in with the Linking Open Data project (perhaps 'movement' is a better term, or 'underground').

I'd really love to see the VO sitting in the middle of that diagram, and it won't be that hard.

ESWC07

I was at the European Semantic Web conference in Innsbruck last month, and I've put a summary account of the meeting on the VOTech wiki.

I've now been at ISWC05, ESWC06, ISWC06 and ESWC07, and I fancy I can detect some change of tone over that period. The first one seemed to have a lot of folk talking about interesting logics they've thought up, and how to express rules, and how to implement triple stores, in soporific detail; the later ones are a lot less defensive about the whole SW notion, and more concerned with Web-2.0ish issues of how you make realistially usable (as opposed to merely non-theoretical) applications, what performance issues there are, and how do you actually get all these triples.

There was a certain amount of workshop- and beer-based conversation about just how the SW is different from Web-2.0: there wasn't a clear one-line conclusion, but I have the vague feeling that the cheerful-cowboy Web-2.0 approach is running our of steam a bit, as folk confront the limitations of what you can actually do with the APIs that this or that service makes available, just as the SW approach is gaining confidence, and pulling/pooling information in much more sophisticated ways.

Perhaps I've just got better at giving the funky-logic talks a bodyswerve, but I think this represents a change in the community, from a CS-heavy to a developer-led one, which now has the leisure to be interested in practicalities.

Welcome to the Semantic Astronomy blog

There are lots of people worldwide working on the Virtual Observatory; there's a very broad range of folk making the Semantic Web a reality. Where these intersect is Semantic Astronomy, and that's what this blog's all about.

It's a group blog, so various people will be posting to it, mentioning work they're doing, or pointing to other VO or SW developments. How broad a net will we cast? We'll find out. How often will new stuff appear? We'll find out. Will we have lavish podcasts? No, on reflection probably not.

So, all together now: SPARQL, SPARQL, little star...